Russia launches first anti-Daesh air strikes in Syria

A US official said the strike was near the city of Homs in what is Moscow's first engagement in a distant theatre of war since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Russia launched its first air strikes in Syria on Wednesday after President Vladimir Putin won parliamentary permission to use force abroad, the United States said.
Russia’s defense ministry says its jets are carrying out airstrikes on Daesh positions in Syria.
Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told Russian news agencies on Wednesday that Russian jets are carrying out targeted airstrikes on the positions, vehicles and warehouses that Russia believes belong to Daesh militants.
Russia’s upper chamber of parliament earlier on Wednesday gave the green light to President Vladimir Putin’s request to send Russian troops to Syria.
Russian warplanes carried out air strikes in three Syrian provinces along with regime aircraft on Wednesday, a Syrian security source told AFP.
“Russian and Syrian airplanes carried out numerous strikes today against terrorist positions in Hama, Homs and Latakia provinces,” the source said.
Russia's deepening engagement in Syria comes as Putin and US President Barack Obama push rival plans on ways to defeat Daesh in Syria and on the future role of the country's embattled leader Bashar Al Assad.
"They gave us a heads-up they were going to start striking in Syria," a US defence official said. "It was in the vicinity of Homs."
President Vladimir Putin had just hours earlier won permission from the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, to deploy troops abroad.
"The Federation Council unanimously supported the president's request," the Kremlin's chief of staff Sergei Ivanov said.
He said the decision to launch air strikes was taken after Assad asked Russia for military support.
Ivanov, a former defence minister, declined to give details of the operation, saying only it would be limited in duration and ruling out ground operations by Russian troops.
Damascus confirmed Assad had requested military assistance from Russia.
Russia is later Wednesday to preside over a special UN Security Council meeting on countering terrorist threats that is bound to produce a sharp difference of views between Moscow and Washington.
Addressing the UN General Assembly for the first time in a decade, Putin on Monday proposed a broad UN-backed coalition to fight IS militants and clashed with Obama on the future of Assad.
Washington and its allies blame Assad for the mayhem in Syria, where four years of bloodshed have killed more than 240,000 people.
France, which is part of the US-led coalition against Daesh, carried out its first air strikes against the extremists' positions in Syria on Sunday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the bombs killed at least 30 militants, including 12 child soldiers.
Russia's first engagement
Russia argues that the West should support Assad in his fight against the militants.
But Washington says the Syrian leader must go if Daesh is to be defeated.
The Pentagon says Russia has in recent weeks sent warplanes and other military hardware to northwestern Syria - along with at least 500 troops - in what many fear is an attempt to keep the war-torn country's president in power.
Russia's military involvement in Syria will be Moscow's first engagement outside the former Soviet Union since the occupation of Afghanistan in 1979.
Ivanov said that by moving to launch air strikes in Syria, Russia was acting in the national interest, to prevent foreign terrorist fighters from crossing its borders.
"We are not talking about achieving some foreign policy goals, satisfying someone's ambitions - what our Western partners regularly accuse us of."
According to a recent poll by the respected Levada Centre, 69 percent of Russians are against Moscow's deployment of troops in Syria, with just 14 percent in favour.
Wednesday's news set social networks alight, with many commentators predicting dire consequences for Russians.
"Hide your sons," one Russian, Zaira Abdullaeva, wrote on Facebook.

• MENA